Two emails in my in-box today; one from Linn Records, and one from HDTracks.com. Both feature Liszt Piano concertos, which puts me in a quandary: should I get this one, or this one?

Are the Scottish bits better than the ones from USA? The latter are certainly cheaper - 2/3rds the price - but do I get as many, and are they as good?

Oh, hang on a mo. - HD Tracks isn't allowed to sell it to me since I live in the UK, but wait! I can get a month's subscription to a proxy in the USA for USD7.00, and USD25 is, I reckon, still cheaper than GBP18.00, just for this one album. So if I bought more...

Any advice/views? Any lawyers reading this: is this an anti-competitive practice?

Nick, we all know by now that music distribution and copyrights work in most peculiar ways, most of which a terribly frustrating for anyone who does not happen to live in the US of A. If I was you, I would not make too much noise if you found a way to beat the system. Just be merry because YES, YOU CAN!

I agree that a lot of online music retailers are trying to make indecent profts on lossless downloads ingeneral, let alone HD ones....
I can by Future Sound of Jazz Vol 12 for 11 euro's in the shop on a physical cd support with a booklet etc etc..., or download it legally on soulseduction.com in wav quality for 17 euro's... go figure!!!
Same with HD versions... even more expensive. Lossless downloads of CD's are more expensive then a blu-ray version of a music concert.... again.. go figure!

This is defintely not the way to hope winning back the losses faced ba the industry for completely missing the boat on the future of music distribution a 5 years back...

(2012-04-20 11:44)ilduro Wrote: If I was you, I would not make too much noise if you found a way to beat the system. Just be merry because YES, YOU CAN!

... and if we all did that, and carried on paying 50% over the odds, those nice people running the industry will of course see that those loyal customers outside the USA deserve reward, so will eventually apply a currency- and territory-neutral pricing policy... Or not.

But if enough people squawk about it, and start discussing anti-trust and anti-competitive practices, USA and EU trade bodies might - just might - take notice, as they have done with iTunes, and are starting to do so with eBooks.

(2012-04-20 12:15)grimreaper46 Wrote: You will need to download the Linn Download Manager (you will be prompted to do this). Plus you need to change the file with the artwork to Folder.jpg to display in Kinsky.

The need for Folder.jpg is not related to Kinsky. I'm happily displaying PNG artwork in Kinsky with MinimServer as my server. I believe this is a Twonky limitation.

(2012-04-20 12:15)grimreaper46 Wrote: Use a non UK mail address (i.e mine is "name"@virginmedia.com).
Don't use a UK Card. Set up a PayPal account and use that.
My experiance with HDTracks has been good, my experience with LinnRecords better.
I would be tempted, provided the content and cost are not significantly different to go with LinnRecords. Linn's are from the master, HD Tracks are undefined.
You will need to download the Linn Download Manager (you will be prompted to do this). Plus you need to change the file with the artwork to Folder.jpg to display in Kinsky.

That was true for me up till around two months ago; at that point, their IP filter started to recognise my IP as not a valid destination for sales of some of their offerings. NB only some recordings have this restriction.

I'd like to emphasise that I stated this thread to draw peoples' attention to the iniquitous situation where exactly the same recording is available on both sides of the Atlantic, but for wildly different prices. I did not start it with the intention of going over ground already covered on how to work around these restrictions.

UK and USA are both signatories to the WTO's accords; is this purely geographically-based price differential legal under WTO terms?

(2012-04-20 10:37)NickP Wrote: ....Oh, hang on a mo. - HD Tracks isn't allowed to sell it to me since I live in the UK, but wait! I can get a month's subscription to a proxy in the USA for USD7.00, and USD25 is, I reckon, still cheaper than GBP18.00, just for this one album. So if I bought more...

Any advice/views? Any lawyers reading this: is this an anti-competitive practice?

Hi

Ignoring the legal issues for a moment, I guess it would make financial sense for a group of friends to chip in and purchase one proxy to share amongst them (so one of them could submit all the orders to HD Tracks). Of course, that would also encourage the group to just share the cost of the media, too (split the cost of an album and just share it) and thus encourage them to totally break the law. This is yet another example of how the industry is completely out of touch with reality as by introducing issues like the HD Tracks one, my suggested 'solution' actually creates a situation where sharing becomes far more of a temptation than would otherwise have been the case.

As to your other point about Linn Records pricing, Linn have done a great job and it is a magnificent site, but as I know that the 24 bit prices will be too high for me, these days I never even consider browsing LR and instead just buy the CD's I want from Amazon (as I can normally get about 3 CD's for the same price as a single 24 bit album from LR). If something really special (to me) were to appear on the LR site, then I'd still be tempted to buy it, but the trouble is that I'd never know about it as the pricing strategy has pushed me away. I don't expect exact price matching between HDT and LR, but they need to be a lot closer than they are at the moment before I'd be tempted to even browse the LR site.

(2012-04-20 14:05)Briain Wrote: Ignoring the legal issues for a moment, I guess it would make financial sense for a group of friends to chip in and purchase one proxy to share amongst them (so one of them could submit all the orders to HD Tracks).

The proxy I used gives a free trial, and records the originating IP of the account, to prevent repeated free trials being taken up. I'd guess that there are similar technologies in place to prevent sharing of a subscription. But, nothing could stop one person doing the downloading & then saving the files on to physical media for distribution.

(2012-04-20 14:05)Briain Wrote: Of course, that would also encourage the group to just share the cost of the media, too (split the cost of an album and just share it) and thus encourage them to totally break the law.